One evening you receive a very excited call from one of your neighbors, the eccentric physicist Jeremiah Krick. He begs you to come as fast as possible to look out for his one-year-old daughter Amanda. No one else has time and it seems to be very urgent. But when you arrive at the physicist's lighthouse for the child, suddenly a mysterious Black Creature seems to come out of the wall, grasps Amanda, and leaves through a door into another dimension. And because you are now responsible for her life you decide to get the child back, no matter what the cost.

On the other side of the portal you find yourself in a completely unfamiliar universe. You see a beach and behind that a tower, where you find a workshop with a lot of incomprehensible inventions. A very strange mechanical bird circles in the sky. You begin to carefully explore this hugh fortified isle in the world of the terrible Black Creature and you find armor from some long forgotten war and a strangely shaped submarine floating in a cave. You discover that navigating this submarine is easy to learn and that you can also navigate a bat-style glider, which you land at a Temple flanked by two hugh menacing statues. Inside you meet Lyril, the crippled guard who can only live if she stays inside her mechanical world. She will tell you how to reach the Black Creature's headquarters.

And it is there, where the Black Creature lives, that the adventure reaches its climax. On a forsaken rocky peninsula, you find a dark, dirty industrial complex. Inside there is a large workshop with a lot of items which you will need to confront the Black Creature. But to get to him you have to navigate a strange train through a complicated tunnel labyrinth. Finally you do find the scientist Krick and his daughter Amanda, prisoners within a network of cables and tubes. Will you be able to save them in time and defeat the Black Creature?

Technique and Game Idea

The animations, pictures and characters of this game were completely molded in 3D. Lighthouse is not a 3D game in real-time but is instead rendered, a requirement for the high quality of the graphics. All of the graphics show the surroundings from the view of the player.

The story consists of elements of fantasy or fairy tale and science fiction. But it isn't exactly the world of traditional fantasy. The Black Creature is like the "Evil One" of traditional stories, but the setting is in the middle of a technologically advanced world. This universe is created with totally unfamiliar architecture and it charms with wonderful landscapes inhabited by strange creatures. Evidently the development of technology in that universe followed a different course from ours but is similar to our own in many ways.

At last we have once again a real, exciting Adventure in which the outcome is actively influenced by the actions of the player. The excellent 3D graphics are representative of the best modern rendering technology and all of the animations move fluidly. The game comes on 2 CD's. The interface is easy to use and the puzzles vary from easy to hard. The only thing that you might miss, as an old
adventure gamer, is a way of keeping score with points to see how you're doing.

(TD, 10/96)

Minimum System Requirements:

486 DX, 66 MHz

DOS ( 5.0 +) or Windows 3.1 / Win 95

8 MB RAM for DOS and Windows 3.1

12 MB RAM for Windows 95

2X CD ROM Drive

SVGA Graphics Card (640 X 480 - 256 Colors)

Sound Card

20
MB Free Hard Drive Space

Mouse

Reviews, Walkthroughs and Other Websites for Lighthouse: The Dark Being